Electronic mail is perhaps the most common form of modern communication among individuals and entities. Virtually anyone with access to a computer network (e.g., the Internet) can send and receive email. To a large degree, the use of email has replaced reliance on more traditional forms of communication, such as telephone and postal mail. In fact, for many corporations and organizations, email is now a mission-critical tool, the failure of which can greatly hinder, or altogether stop, the operations of the corporation or organization. Further, although email is already a primary form of communication as described above, the volume of email continues to considerably grow at a fast rate and merits the close attention of email administrators.
Given the heavy use of electronic mail, many email users receive hundreds of different emails a day. Oftentimes, much of the email received by an individual is irrelevant (or more colloquially, is “junk”) and serves as a nuisance that the individual must navigate through. In other situations, while a certain set of received emails may all be at least somewhat relevant to the recipient, the recipient must still take the time to go through those emails to determine which ones are more important than others.
As email is received and sent over time, the recipient's “inbox” and “sent folder” becomes a vast store of information. For many corporations and organizations, email might be the most comprehensive and up-to-date repository of knowledge possessed by the corporation or organization. However, despite the potential richness of information in stored email, typical email applications are resigned to providing unintelligent mechanisms (e.g., keyword, sender, recipient, and/or date range searches) for mining through email.